Forums
It was less than a year ago that Wikia chose to launch a new feature, one that would challenge a long-used status quo and bring a new style of communication to its users. The first release came with much backlash — "it's too much like Facebook.", "these notifications are annoying" "this feature is ridden with bugs". Hm, sound familiar? No, I'm not talking about the new forums but rather message walls which served as a answer to talk pages. In retrospect, message walls exceed talk pages in almost every way and it seems like a clear choice to choose the former. However, at first release, this notion was not easily accepted by any user. As message walls are an answer to talk pages, in many ways the new forums serve as the successor to the old ones. The new forums deliver a dramatically simpler and easier-to-use interface. Most users will not be intimidated by it and will more likely to respond especially considering you don't even need to know wikitext to contribute. It's also much easier to reply — it just works. No longer will we be plagued by formatting screw-ups (there were MANY many of these with the old forums) or signature blunders. It's superior to the old forums in every way except one. I'll be the first to admit that indenting is a huge advantage the old one had. I will continue to pester Wikia to add this feature but until then I think the way to have a discussion on the new forums still works. To state my point in a different manor, although indentation might be a better alternative, we will still be able to conduct a healthy discussion using the tools available in the new forum. Another biggie for me is notifications. It was frustrating to have opened up a forum post only to have limited comment aside from a few regulars (you know who you are lol). Notifications will inform more people about community discussions, bringing in more comment. Having more users participate means having more ideas flowing which is obviously positive for this wiki. Also, even besides community discussion, the "General noticeboard" will allow us to let our users be notified about important news such as a new admin being promoted etc. I know some people said they are annoyed by notifications but I don't understand their argument. You only get notified once and if you're uninterested, you can ignore it. You only get multiple notifications if you replied to the thread in which case if you're annoyed, you can just unfollow. This is just like message walls. For me, the two points I made above are very strong positives for the new forums and therefore I have decided to vote for keeping them. I was originally going to save another paragraph addressing some of the concerns you guys had about these forums such as users going off-topic and counterarguing them. However, I decided that I'll just challenge any such points as we go along with this discussion. It'll make for a fun little debate too haha :3